


Prophthasia

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Alexander (2004)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-17
Updated: 2005-08-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:21:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the oracle of Amun in Siwah, Hephaestion comes upon something in the hot sands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prophthasia

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Pollitt

 

 

 

 

The sudden appearance of a sea of green palms and the shimmering azure lakes made Hephaestion think they had come upon a mirage that their desert guides warned them of. It came from nothing, out of the wastes of the sandy desert they marched through. A vast apparition of life too wondrous to be believed.

"The mirages appear when a man is most vulnerable, thirsting for wine and feverish with the heat. They lure a man into their traps, like a woman," the toothless guide had said over a campfire, some nights before. It wasn't long after they left Alexander's founded city, a small band of Companions and their pages, a few infantry and pack animals, snaking through the sifting desert dunes. "And like a viper's sting- or a woman's- they take sanity from a man and lead him to death, forgotten by all save these sands." The guide spread his arms wide in the firelight. His long sleeves dangled and his dark face alive with a gaping smile.

Hephaestion had scoffed at him from the shadows, where he sipped wine and huddled in thick blankets against the chill of the endless night surrounding them. In a way the old wandering guide had been right.

"This can be no mirage," Alexander exclaimed, the first of them to touch the rich soil, the first of them to point the green fields out. He dismounted from Bucephalus and took the reins in his hands. He stepped onto the verdant grasses with a grin, his hair brighter than the golden sand of the march now behind them.

Hephaestion could barely believe it was anything more than a mirage until his own worn boots touched the soil, no more grit underfoot, no more sharp stones and oozing sand to plow slowly though. He caught Alexander's eye and smiled. "So this is Siwah," he said, glancing around. The rows of palms were endless, leading into the oasis, lush and shady. Birds flew between the branches overhead, rustling and twittering and chirping- a sound so strange from the endless silence of sand, the occasional hiss of a snake hidden in a tent, ready to strike as hard as the day's heat, and just as poisonous.

The town was the first one he had seen in weeks. There had been a few scattered homes and granaries, but nothing sizeable since the thick reeds and swollen forks of the Delta. The landscape here was just as green, the people just as dark from the southern sun, their hair just as inky as a horse's sleek side. They rushed out from their homes into the dusty streets, barefoot and grinning, waving to them as they passed. Alexander waved back, cocking his head to the side as ever. Hephaestion rode his own horse once more, the ground now solid beneath its hooves. His beast was nothing like Bucephalus, who could ride in snow or sand or waves, so long as no one but his king-master was astride him.

Glancing over his shoulder, Hephaestion saw Ptolemy. Ptolemy spent too much time surveying Egypt from his horse, in awe of the ancient world, of the endless traditions of thousands of years, fourty-some thousand. Hephaestion couldn't remember the exact number Aristotle had told them in their lessons. Those halcyon days many years ago in Pella were little more than a faint memory creeping up in his dreams.

Egypt could have been as old as the number of grains of sand in the desert they had marched through- eternal and unending. He couldn't think it would ever be any other way. There would always be the young boys running naked through the streets, shrieking at the passing of a new king. There would always be old men leading mules, packed with heavy sacks of grain and fruit, gazing with milky eyes at the world and people around them. There would always be the bustle of women with silver jingling around their wrists as they cried out strange words that might mean "king", or even "God" or "son of the sun" here.

Their black eyes shimmered the way they looked at Alexander with his golden head to match the sun, his rays shining over them. He may well have been the son of the sun.

Except this son of the sun only blazed brighter when, as the Egyptians believed, Ra went into the underworld to battle demons and bring the sun back each night, an elusive war. Much like Alexander's against Darius.

The tents set up an artificial town of their own, a Macedonian refuge from the Egyptians. The locals were all eager and wanting to see strange faces in this provincial oasis. Their guide told the Macedonians no king had in hundreds of years, not since before the Persians. Time here meant something different than in Macedonia. One hundred years to an Egyptian farmer, who worked the same land day by day with gnarled hands, as his forefathers those hundreds of years ago did. It was not the same as a hundred to Hephaestion, who listened sometimes to old Parmenion and even Cleitus speak of a time, not so long ago from their own memory, when their fathers were sheepherders on the mountain before Philip lead them down, lead them to Greece.

And now Alexander led them to Egypt.

Hephaestion reclined in a tent, the linen waving in the cooling desert breeze. The air mumbled and moaned pleasurably through the palm trees around them- perhaps some of the Macedonians "inspecting" the services of local women. The sounds of bugs, hissing and chirping, humming their songs in the night was comforting, no more the silent striking desert. It lulled him, as he lay there, half-slumped on a couch, picking at the dish of honeyed dates his page had brought him. He swirled the saccharine sweets in the silver dish, pushing the honey around with a plump fruit before popping it into his mouth, allowing the honey to once more swirl around.

The wines were poured lazily, the men no longer thirsting so, no longer tasting grit in their mouths to be spat out beside them in woolen chunks as they marched. His feet ached from walking; his boots were wearing at the heel more than Hephaestion would have liked. They had served him so long, moulded perfectly to his feet, the arch of his ankle, and the dips of his toes. He hadn't bothered to even look at his feet in days. They felt blistered in his boots. They cracked beyond belief now; he could feel the slick blood on his soles when his boots were pulled off. He wiggled his toes freely in new sandals, still stiff from the cobbler. It pained him to walk far, but he bit his tongue at that. Most of the soldiers marching through Egypt had little more than rags on their feet, until Alexander ordered new boots to be fashioned for them at the king's own expense.

His tent walls rippled. Hephaestion ignored them, instead gulping down more of his wine and sighing, glad to be able to rest more than one night at long last. His page wasn't rustling around, as he often did. Only the oil lamp moved, sweet and nutty olive oil from home burning smoke tendrils, filling his gaze with gilded light. He closed his eyes, breathing softly with the anticipation of sleep until a cough disrupted him.

Hephaestion opened his eyes. Alexander stood before him, a strange look in his eyes and a smile at his lips. He sat up in his bed. "What is it?"

Alexander put a finger to his lips and held the small lamp he carried higher. He nodded to the flap of the tent. "I hear the waters of the nearby springs are sweet."

Hephaestion laughed, his voice catching with exhaustion. "You must stop listening to Eumenes, Alexander. No Macedonian would ever forgive you if you started mixing your wine the Greek way."

Alexander started to smile wider, his teeth flashing in the dim lamplight. He leaned down, close to Hephaestion, close enough to whisper in his ear and make the hairs around his ear tickle his skin. He was close enough to brush Hephaestion's skin with his wine-sweet lips. "I was thinking of something different to with sweet waters, Hephaestion."

Hephaestion blinked. "Swimming?"

Alexander's shrug couldn't hide his boyish smile, one that reached his eyes. The same look that made pleasure ripple through Hephaestion's blood, heating his loins, making them harden with thought of more.

"The night is dark," he said, rising beside Alexander. "Then men won't notice if you sneak off tonight." Hephaestion reached out, wrapping his hand around Alexander's arm to draw him nearer. Alexander yielded without resistance, as ever he did and kissed him slowly, their mouths lethargic from wine, their tongues sticky from honey, their lips sunchapped and rough, but willing and wanting.

"Even if the men did notice," Alexander said, pulling away and stepping towards the door, "would we care?"

Hephaestion smiled as Alexander turned to leave and he followed him from the tent.

The pools of Siwah were as sweet as the fruits of the oasis orchards, but Alexander's mouth and hands and legs and cock sweeter still. The stars above twinkled like tiny pearls from the Hellespont, doubly reflected. The ripples and splashes Alexander and Hephaestion made distorted the sky brought down to earth over the waters. They made love, wrinkled and laughing and hair dripping fat droplets sloping down their entwined limbs until Ra had won again the east and his bark started to tint the sky pale purple and carnelian.

"Let us return and sleep," Alexander's lips moved again Hephaestion's shoulder, stirring him from a drowsy slumber, "for I want to consult the oracle before long this morning."

After a couple hours' sleep in his tent, no longer in the arms of Alexander by the pool's shore, Hephaestion woke to the temple shining brighter than even the sun reflecting on sand, on water, or the glinting breastplates of the camp sentries. It blinded the whitest, purest colour Hephaestion had ever seen. The Companions set off to visit it, rising bleary-eyed from a night of drinking and whoring, the soldiers' life. They approached it slowly, their heads tilted back in awe of the height, as high as any of the temples in Memphis. But this temple, in the middle of a desert oasis, was more awesome. It dwarfed everything else for leagues out into the vast desert, save only the triple-backed mountain at the edge of town, peppered with its rock-cut tombs. The locals were said to call it the Mountain of Death.

It was the scent of the temple, the sounds, and the mysterious quiescence that descended upon the group of them walking to the temple that was most striking. Figures of ram-headed gods and snake-headed goddesses, stiff in their poses, forever frozen in time offering flowers and prayers to Amun were painted on the temple faade. Taller than any man five, ten times over. Jewel-bright painted colours against the marble white pylons, everything glittering and gold-tinted by the morning sun, just hovering over the eastern hills, just hovering over the tops of the frondant datepalms and grape vines. The local villagers were heard singing and calling to each other as they went to tend them. The only word Hephaestion could understand was "Amun", which they shouted again and again to each other, maybe asking the god to bless them, to bless their land.

Up close, the majestic gods and goddesses and long-dead pharaohs prostrating themselves to their lord Amun were flaked; the paints were chipped and the carved figures blunted by time. Their images were not the sharp ones they seemed from a distance. The temple wall, so gleaming white before, had cracks and chinks. The gold glints, the lapis eyes, the red crowns and malachite scales- all had been neglected. Hephaestion touched the pylon as he passed it. It was cool to the touch, the stone and plaster as dead as the paintings, too, seemed to be.

And yet, at the same time, it felt eerily alive. He shivered and pulled his hand away, falling back in step with the others. Their long march through the desert concluded with this one place. This dilapidated temple in the middle of the Libyan desert, so far removed from anything save time. It was almost less than it should have been, forgotten by the Persians, forgotten by the kings of old, disintegrated, starting to crumble at the base.

He wondered if the legendary pyramids might be the same. If time would ever touch them. From the palace at Memphis, the pyramids were living mountains, gleaming white in an ocean sky. But so had Amun's precinct at Siwah seemed from the town.

The cries of bleating sheep emanated from the temple pens, ever clearer as Hephaestion drew near, hardly more than two paces behind Alexander's forward stride. The temple shadows grew around them. Half-hidden priests scurried across the grounds, up the steps, arms laden with fruits, others burdened with papyrus scrolls. All were bareheaded. All were wearing white linen, like Alexander now. Like wraiths, their words unknown and hushed as Alexander started up the steps before them.

At the top of the steps, a weathered priest stood rising like a beacon, stoic and still. The mystagogus, the priest there to greet foreigners. In this respect, Egypt was not much different from Delphi or Dodona, or any other temple they had been to over the past two years.

Fur from a painted cat- a leopard or cheetah or some other exotic beast Hephaestion may have yet heard of- was slung over a priest's shoulder. Acolytes stood beside him, younger and wider-eyed to the equally wide-eyed Macedonians entering their temple.

In an accent thicker than the honey flowing from his words, the priest spoke to Alexander, "Welcome, great Pharaoh," he said, bowing low. "Amun is most pleased with you to visit his home."

Alexander waved him off, always impatient. "Bring me to the oracle," he said curtly. He was shifting slightly, moving closer to the temple, around the priest, trying to see further inside the dark colonnades.

The priest turned to his attendants, who spoke to him with hurried words and shifting eyes. They glanced to Hephaestion and the other companions who had come along this morning, their eyes lingering on Cassander and Lysimachus and particularly Ptolemy, perhaps for his light hair. Perhaps more for his glazed eyes at the temple. It was a monument to father Zeus himself in Egypt, his home an oasis mirage, an Olympus in the south that touched the clouds with its pylon peaks.

"Come, my lord," the priest said, leading Alexander into the dark beyond. Hephaestion moved to follow, but one of the younger priests stopped him, holding his arms out and barring his way. Alexander didn't see or turn around.

"None but the king may enter," the acolyte said, louder and with better Greek than Hephaestion expected. He smelled of musky myrrh and smoky frankincense and other smoldering herbs, unnamed and unknown. Probably from the other acolyte holding a gilded brazier, following close behind Alexander and the older priest.

Alexander disappeared into the temple with a snaking trail of smoke. A whispered offering carried the prayers of the other worshippers starting to gather at the temple base, torn between wailing to Amun and staring at the Macedonians grouped there.

Hephaestion sighed and stepped down, moving back to the other Companions. Ratting sistrums and high-pitched wailing of women echoed from the deep within the temple. Alexander's clicking boots were lost in their caterwaul.

"Priestesses," Ptolemy said. "Priestesses of Amun."

Hephaestion nodded. Louder and duller than the female cries and shaking cymbals were strange thumps. As though Amun had come down to earth to speak to Alexander, hitting the ground with a thud worthy of a barbarian falling in battle. So inglorious and ignoble that Hephaestion couldn't help but smile.

"What?" Ptolemy asked.

"Nothing." Hephaestion shook his head. "Just the strangeness of this place."

"I like Egypt," Ptolemy went on. Cassander looked up at the both of them. His ox-eyes narrowed and his mouth twitched.

"Give me the hills of Macedon any day," Cleitus declared loudly. "Let the Egyptians rot here in their history and tradition. They can keep it all!"

Some of the others cheered.

"What do old men know of other worlds?" Ptolemy whispered in his ear. "They long for home. They long, too, for the past. Not unlike the Egyptians."

The sun was fast ascending in the sky, beating down on Hephaestion's head. The wafts of incense swirled around the columns like giant clouded papyrus shafts, painted blue lilies and strange picture-letters declaring age-old prayers. His head ached- never had he been surrounded by so much burning resin. It was stifling along with the muggy heat that made his robes stick to his body with his sweat dribbling from every pore and more. The smoke stung his eyes, the sun even more so.

Hephaestion turned around, walking away from the temple as another series of thumps ricocheted inside the walls. He moved towards the mountain peaks nearby, counting the distant thumps in succession. Five. Six. Pause. Seven. Eight. Nine. Pause.

Three humps were outlined on the glistening blue sky. There was nary a cloud in sight, save the dissipating incenses and fires from boxy white homes in the village. Roasted lunches Hephaestion thought was madness in the rising heat of day.

His own stomach grumbled as he passed a series of houses. The smells of baking favourite bread and the onions of the Egyptians were ambrosia to his senses. But the heat made him retreat to the furthest shadows. Chickens scattered feathers and dust in his wake. He breathed in the grainy air, only slightly fresher than that closer to the temple. More and more people were milling around the precinct, their bustling words louder, their sweaty unwashed bodies stronger still. Only the desert winds, softened through the palm forests to be less bitter and biting, made the oasis cooler and helped the stench away. Hephaestion walked along the shady winding paths between the homes.

The ground crunched louder the bigger the three peaks rose on the horizon. They engulfed his view with rocky cliffs, spotted with holes of the tombs. The sun was fiercer here, and when he stepped over the threshold into the desert a palpable line between the green trees and soft soil and the jagged rocks and barrenness beyond was drawn for him by the gods.

Mostly, it was silent. As the moment of death must be, before a soul descended to the murmuring halls of Hades. No bleating goats. No chirping birds. No chanting priests or wailing priestesses. No laughing children or the familiar tongue of his fellow Macedonians exploring the small oasis. Hephaestion closed his eyes, reveling in the peace. Beyond the mountain the desert rippled along the horizon, the heat waves distorting the view of endless dunes into the east, into the west, north and south.

There were paths, well-worn lines in the few scrub bushes and gritting stones. He walked along the way, shielding his eyes with his hand. Hephaestion wishing he had bothered to have kohl, as Alexander did, to outline his eyes as black and exotic as the locals, as mysterious as their gods. Only they seemed immune to the blinding reflection that burned his eyes like the sun burned his peeling face.

Even within short distance his skin felt aflame again; the desert cooked him dark like the locals, like the dates growing fat and ripe on the palms. He squinted ahead to see a moving shape beyond him on the path. Hephaestion stopped walking as the figure moved closer- an old man with a cane, leading a pack animal, as ever his ancestors must have before.

The man, his face wrinkled and beaten like old leather, slowed. Hephaestion knew his strange clothing and pale hair and eyes were immediate signs of his foreignness. He anticipated the staring eyes, as the all the other Egyptians were prone to doing.

But the man's eyes narrowed, flickering with something unusual in their black depths. His gaze shifted back to the mountain peaks behind him, and then he put something from his fisted hand under his rough robe folds.

"What was that?" Hephaestion asked loudly. His hand inched down to his sword hilt. The metal seared his fingertips, the sun's furnace having baked it too.

The man's lined face softened, then he started to smile; his gums showed a half-rotted grin. He reached back under his folds, surprisingly spry, and pulled out his fist. "This?" he asked, uncurling his palm.

There was a glint in his hand. Or maybe it was the sun above, making everything shimmer and waver, making one see the oases on the horizon under its spell. Hephaestion moved closer. "You speak Greek?"

The man laughed, ragged and eager. "Yes, yes," he said, his Greek stronger with each word, "I was a mercenary once. Fought at Coronea for the Spartans."

"I mistook you, then, old man," Hephaestion said, "for no more than a common Egyptian." He leaned over the man's hand for a better look, as the man proffered something still.

A small ring lay in his hand. A band of gold with a stone in it. A striated stone of the colours of the cliff, all varied gleaming layers of amber and gold and ebony.

"I found it buried," the man said, his smile dropping. "Buried and waiting."

"Buried?"

The man shrugged, wincing as he leaned on his crooked cane for support. He winked and nodded back to the peaks. "Buried."

Hephaestion was silent a moment. "You desecrate the dead?"

The man was silent a moment in return. "It was waiting for someone like you." With a flick of his hand, the ring was thrown in an arc above Hephaestion's head. He held out his hands to catch it, the ring hitting his palm with a cool flash before it warmed once more. "I merely helped it find you."

With a nod, the man shuffled past, leading his mule with a short rope of fraying hemp. Hephaestion watched him move past, back towards the village. His baggage jangled with the tell-tale sound of metal each time the mule plodded a step.

He stood there, in the desert path, just observing the old grave robber. He turned back to the mountain peaks, looming ominously stark and steep as ever they had before, as ever they would in ages to come. Hephaestion sighed. He tucked the ring under his own robes, in a small pocket next to his thigh and walked back towards the Macedonian camp on the other side of the town. Surely Alexander would be done at the temple soon enough.

The camp was scattered when he returned, only a few page boys lounging in the shade near Alexander's tent, playing with sheep's bone dice and shouting their bets. One stood up when Hephaestion approached, brushing dust from his dirtied hands. "My lord?"

"The king has not yet returned?" he asked, motioning to Alexander's tent, the striped walls billowing with the breeze.

"No, my lord."

Hephaestion nodded. He wouldn't have thought the oracle to take this long. The Pythia, though unwilling to divine for Alexander, had been faster with her trance. But these Egyptians were different than Macedonians or Greeks. Time seemed dichotomously less relevant, and more.

He retreated to his own tent. The camp was quiet. The midday sun was too hot, seething and writhing as a flaring torch of the gods as it traversed the clear and cloudless sky above. "Fetch me some wine," he told his page, who rose guiltily from Hephaestion's own couch, running off quickly.

Hephaestion had removed his sandals and robes by the time the boy returned. The page brought an amphora in one hand and a horn cup in the other. He lowered his eyes further from Hephaestion as his master settled himself, nude and hot, almost to point of discomfort. He snatched the wine from the boy and gulped it down in one go; then he held his cup out for another. Wine sloshed onto his hand as the boy poured, cool and dark as blood.

"Leave me be until the king returns," he said, stretching his legs out. The cushions beneath his body itched. The gilt-threaded bolsters and thick velvets were sumptuous in Macedon and Asia, but ill-suited to the climate in Egypt. Sweat trickled down his face, down his back, down his sides and he napped fitfully. He wanted to sleep- the night's swimming and sex finally settling into his muscles and tiring him, the heat blanketing him palpably with lethargy, but nothing more came of it.

Sleep was a fickle mistress. Hephaestion sighed and rolled over. He draped his face with a linen sheet to blot out the light that streamed through the cracks in the tent's fabric with each gust of desert air. It was in vain, for the winds blew up the corners of the sheet and pricked his eyes with harsh sunlight, never allowing him peace.

The Companions returned in small numbers, some from the direction of the temple. Black Cleitus' voice was loud in his hazy dreams, floating with the scattered marines of water, the flickering deep forests of green, crackling flames alive and faces moving like wan wraiths. Perhaps they were echoes of the men he killed in battles before, perhaps they were the ghosts of this place, old and ancient, never willing to let go and leave.

Other Companions returned in the company of harlots, all local women Hephaestion heard giggling and murmuring between the tents, where curtains of canvas concealed them. But their moans and their panting were not masked by the folds of the tents. Nor the grunts of the soldiers as they spilled themselves. The smells of the town- of rotting rubbish in the heat, of rotting shit, buzzing flies gathering everywhere rose with the afternoon. Hephaestion swatted them away from his ears, their incessant humming not helping his sleep come either.

And the burning incenses, always present, pounded his head. The musk and smoke and flowery and spicy trails clinging to Siwah like a thirsted traveller to a pool. The pools of the oasis, perhaps.

Dusk brought more harlots among the tents, more laughter and louder words, stories of exploring the oasis, of climbing the palms and picking the juicy dates right from the branches. Hephaestion dressed himself and drank more wine. He emerged from his tent all the more groggy and tired with the setting sun. The sky was coloured a brilliant array of silken colours, like the bazaars of Memphis, golds and oranges and scarlets giving way to deep ultramarines and violets and indigos as the Eastern star showed herself on the horizon.

Hephaestion passed the campfires, each laden with the smells of dripping meat roasted over them making his stomach growl. He bade a page fetch him something to eat. He leaned against a tent pillar, not far from Alexander's tent, devouring the hot meat, his fingers burning from the grease and blackened by the charred skin. He flung the bones to the ground, watching a dog trot over to sniff it out for his own dinner.

There were glowing lights inside Alexander's tent which illuminated figures moving like shadowed puppets against the walls. Hephaestion had heard nothing of the king's return from the temple yet. He watched the forms move, Manes floating across the fabric, silent and rippling and dancing.

"What all could this Egyptian god have wanted to say to him?" Hephaestion muttered to himself. He rubbed his arms. The night's chill was cloaking the oasis as fast as the sun had set and the world dawned in darkness. He wished he had brought a blanket to wrap around himself. The hairs on his arms prickled and his toes were cold in the strapped sandals. The ground crunched underfoot like the glass mosaics in the palace at Pella.

There were guards in front of the king's tent, their armour glimmering bronze. Hephaestion stepped from the shadows into the torch light, no longer a lurking threat that made their backs stiff and their cocks hard, in the hope a local woman was near, most like. His smirk dropped but their staffs rose. "The king wishes to see no one," one said.

"I didn't know he had returned," Hephaestion said. "Bid me enter."

The guard's eyes flashed with the campfires dotting the oasis. "The king wishes to see no one this evening."

Hephaestion sighed, taking a step back. He waited and slowly the staffs relented, allowing him through the heavy curtains. The tent rustled; the tiny bells and beads hanging from the curtains that enveloped Hephaestion jingled and rattled as he entered, announcing his presence loudly in the quiet tent beyond.

"I thought I said I wished to be alone!" Alexander's voice shouted.

"Were you not alone all day in the temple?" Hephaestion called out slowly, stopping in the entrance of the tent. The rugs underneath warmed his feet. Soft-burning lamps of oil gave the room a flickering glow. No more was the stench of the thick incense from the temple, from the local crowds, from the oasis. This place was Macedon. Small statues of Dionysus on the tables, grape vines entwined on his brow, curving Greek sculptures on the lamp handles, Aphrodite's pert breasts and Diana's crescent moon diadem, all wrought from gold and iron. Black and red vases, the cups of wine left scattered by the king.

Alexander's head rose from his couch, deeper in the tent, half-hidden by carved stools and inlaid chests smelling strongly of Lebanese cedar. Hephaestion breathed them in deeply, his senses clearing, the anvil in his mind ceasing to throb. He could see Alexander with a gem-studded goblet of wine in his hand; his grey eyes were dark and glazed, rimmed with purple sleeplessness. He closed his eyes as Hephaestion sat down on the couch next to him. Alexander was warm and his cheeks burned with the start of an evening's drinking.

"Do I look like a god, Hephaestion?" Alexander asked, sitting up. He didn't touch Hephaestion.

"You look like Alexander."

Alexander snorted, dropping his cup. It tumbled empty and hollow onto the shaggy furs and patterned rugs at their feet. "The oracle addressed me as a god. Do I look like a god, Hephaestion?"

The look in Alexander's eyes- it was the same as his mother had. Olympias, the one they all whispered was a witch when Alexander's head was turned. If she truly was or wasn't no one but she herself knew, but the wildness, the feral glint in the slate Alexander's eyes now showed made Hephaestion wonder. He said nothing and reached out to touch Alexander's cheek. His face was feverish, hot, the kohl around his eyes dribbling down the sides like tears of soot.

"You are the only one who is completely truthful with me," Alexander said, turning his face into Hephaestion's palm, kissing his hand sloppily. "Do I?"

"You look the same Alexander as ever you have been," Hephaestion said. "Perhaps you are more to these people, but to me you are ever the same as always." His fingers stroked the side of Alexander's face. He wiped the stains away and drew him closer. "Do you wish to be a god, Alexander?"

Alexander looked up. His eyes shone from the lamps littering the room, the braziers of sweet-burning olive oil from home swinging as the wind rustled the king's papers, the tent walls, the satin tassels of the hanging panels of weaved gods and heroes. Waxy candles dribbled, spilling onto the tables, pooling thick puddles at their bases. "In your arms I reach god-head," he said after a moment, his gaze straight. He brushed his lips to Hephaestion's, pushing their bodies together as he wrapped an arm over Hephaestion's shoulder. His fingers curled into Hephaestion's skin sharply as their mouths moved deeper, harder, their lips never forgetting each other, even through the haze of drink and sleeplessness.

Alexander pulled back, licking his lips, his gaze lowering. Hephaestion could feel himself harden under that gaze, imagining where that tongue might touch, taste him soon. His shivered not of his own volition, his heart beating like a furious war drum within his breath.

And Alexander knew all this. He had to. "Make me divine, Hephaestion."

Hephaestion moaned and kissed Alexander once more, pushing him back onto the bolsters and pillows, pushing them roughly to the floor as he threaded his hands through Alexander's hair, which was still rough with the desert grit. He tasted of honeyed dates and smoky meats, and spiced wine. Most of all he tasted of the faint musk of the temple. But on Alexander, on Alexander's tongue, on his skin, his lips, his everywhere it was like tasting divinity itself. Hephaestion was light-headed by the smell, by the taste in his mouth, this time different. It was Alexander, not Egypt and he devoured it. He inhaled the residue of incenses clinging to Alexander's body, diffused in his sweat as Hephaestion kissed and licked a path down Alexander's chest, making him moan and writhe like an oracle. Inspired by a different divinity, one of the flesh, one of mortal man, one of love.

They discarded their clothes like dancers, waving cloth trails in the air, catching hems on candles and lamps and singing them, neither caring that there would be black marks in the morning when laundresses came. Alexander's body glowed gold, his eyes deep silver and onyx swirling together, shining variegated colours in the light like Hephaestion's ring, now heaped on the floor under clothes. Sweat glistened on his belly; his muscles were outlined with wet kisses and hot salt, fingers pushing, kneading, teasing and leaving raw red marks to hold Alexander still. He wriggled like a fish, gasping for air when Hephaestion's tongue flicked at his nipples, feeling them harden in his mouth as he sucked and nipped in the manner than made Alexander plead with his fists clutching the sheets below them, plead with his parting thighs, plead with his bucking hips.

"Gods, Hephaestion..." he groaned, arching his back, his hands buried in Hephaestion's hair, urging him further downward and to stop at once. "What you do to me." Alexander hissed as Hephaestion touched his tongue to his cock, as proud and erect as he was. As painfully swollen and begging for release.

"Do you want to become a god, Alexander?" he asked, pulling his mouth away deliberately slowly as Alexander moaned in protest. His hands still splayed Alexander's legs, the skin on his inner thighs paler, softer, the hairs downy. He smiled at Alexander, leaning in to kiss him softly on the mouth, so chaste and innocent from where his lips had last been.

Hephaestion bit his lip, nibbling and tugging with his teeth. "Do you?" His hands crept up Alexander's legs, feeling the cock between them bobbing, straining, slick at the head. Alexander's thighs quivered under Hephaestion's own, which pinned him down to the couch.

"You know the answer to that," Alexander said. His voice was rough and throaty. Hephaestion moaned at the sound- it played in his mind more sweetly, more wonderfully than the most skilled harpist alive could ever do. More than even Orpheus himself, with his tortoise-shell lyre. "Where is the-" he panted, reaching blindly on a table near his ear. Necklaces were sent jangling and lamps tipping, the oil sizzling and hot.

Hephaestion pulled the dish of oil from the table, leaning over Alexander, purposely grinding his hips down and making them both moan louder as their cocks brushed. He looked at Alexander beneath him, spread out on the couch, his hair fanning over the crimson bolsters, his eyes slitted, his body writhing with more ecstasy and passion than an oracle could ever achieve from a god above.

The oil was cool and viscous, more than Hephaestion would have thought from the desert heat, now descended to desert cold, jackals howling in the distance louder than Alexander's moans beneath him, louder than his gasp when he pushed inside, panting and dripping sweat, his hair covering his face from Alexander, whose own eyes were rolled back, his teeth bared like a lion, but roaring with a different purpose. "Gods..."

His strokes were timed with the winds, the tents flapping as he thrust inside Alexander, their moans rising as the temperature cooled, as the lamps burned lower and lower and the soldiers in the camp beyond whistling for their sluts and stumbling drunkenly to their beds. Hephaestion, too, felt drunk, drunk on Alexander: his mouth the wine that intoxicated him, his body the vessel that consumed him from the root, and he reveled in the bacchic frenzy of Alexander's twined legs, of the grasping hands on his back, of their cursing to the gods never to stop.

"I can't," he mumbled into Alexander's ear. His head slumped to the bolster beside Alexander as their bodies moved together. "I could never- oh gods!" He gripped Alexander's arms tightly, his hips pushing forward, his cock thrusting to the hilt, never able to get enough. The slick oil and the velvet surrounding him finally making him surrender. He poured himself inside Alexander, who clenched around him and kissed him fiercely, like a lion, like a king, like a god and came himself, spurting hot onto Hephaestion's stomach with a lingering groan.

They lay replete in the tent, bodies and limbs sticky from sex, slick from the oil and sluggish in want of sleep. The campfires outside were starting to dim, one by one, as the lamps inside snuffed themselves. Hephaestion rubbed Alexander's shoulders, always tense from his duties as king, never relaxing, save with Hephaestion wrapped around him in the aftermath of sex.

"The oracle told me I would rule the world," Alexander said, his words hushed. He stroked Hephaestion's hair. His fingers were a living comb, touching so briefly, so soft that Hephaestion closed his eyes and sighed in contentment. "It said I would rule the world, as a god."

"And do you believe this Egyptian oracle?" Hephaestion asked, resting his head on Alexander's chest, his heart beating furiously inside still, slowing gradually in his breast.

"If I was a god, I would want the world." His hand stopped and Hephaestion looked up at him. "But only with you at my side."

Hephaestion hummed in agreement, but said nothing. In this moment, he wanted nothing less himself, but beyond the tent walls, beyond the embrace of Alexander here and now, he didn't know what lay. He didn't want to know.

Then his eye caught the glint of something from amongst the thick animal furs on the tent floor. Next to discarded clothes, sun-streaked brown and gold. The ring the old man had given him. A half-thought that he should give it to Alexander lingered. Perhaps now, as he lay still and silent beside him, but he knew that he didn't need to see a ring on Alexander's finger to know he loved him beyond life or death or even the shifting sands of time.

 


End file.
